


don't go where i can't follow

by nymphae



Series: the hundred [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Modern AU, Pining, SS agent/president's daughter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-17
Updated: 2015-01-17
Packaged: 2018-03-07 22:11:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3185045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nymphae/pseuds/nymphae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s good at his job. He can count exits at a glance and fell someone without drawing his weapon. He can spot a gun in a crowd and take bullets for someone else. He knows every bullet point and footnote in the stacks of protocol books gathering dust in the office like gravestones. He’s pretty sure that somewhere in them is "don’t fall in love with the president’s daughter."</p>
            </blockquote>





	don't go where i can't follow

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! This is one of the first installments in a long line of B/C crossover au's inspired by similar fics I'd read. This one's a little messy and I think sort of blurred as far as B's character, but bear with me. Many more to follow.

If you had told eighteen-year-old Bellamy Blake that in six short years he would become a White House employee, he would’ve laughed in your face.

Back then, the future looked bleak as his history. He was an angry, smartass kid and an angry, smartass teenager and an angry, smartass soldier that had to learn how to pick his battles or get his ass kicked by his C.O. _“It’s a fucking miracle that you survived,”_ Octavia said once. _“You hate following orders.”_ Which is why she laughed so hard when he first told her he was going to be a Secret Service agent.

She’ll probably piss her pants when he tells her that he spent his morning getting stared down by the President of the United States.

He has never been within thirty feet of Abby Griffin before. He’s only ever seen her through cameras and TV screens, in pressed suits or glittery gowns, practiced smile on her stern mouth. She doesn’t look any less formal here, backed by the presidential seal and Bellamy’s boss, Marcus Kane. She just looks smaller. Behind her Kane’s face is stoic and emotionless.

“Agent Blake.”

Bellamy realizes she had asked him a question. He swears the corner of Kane’s mouth has turned up. _Dick._ “Sorry, ma’am?”

“What makes you think you can protect my daughter?”

Bellamy did not ask for this promotion. He doesn’t want it. He’s happy where he is, standing in doorways and walking hallways, participating in the occasional security breach, not keeping an eye on a teenager 24/7 [1]. “I’ve been protecting people my whole life, ma’am,” Bellamy says stiffly.

“You’re very young,” the president says skeptically.

Bellamy is twenty-three. He does not feel young. He suspects he’s seen more gunfire and death than other twenty-three-year-olds. “I’m good at my job,” he replies.

“So Kane tells me.” President Griffin taps a nail on the glossy wood of her desk and Bellamy glances at Kane again. They have never liked each other; their last interaction was during the aftermath of Wells Jaha’s death—the only black mark on Kane’s record and Bellamy’s first act of defiance. He’s wondering about Kane’s ulterior motives [2] when he realizes the president is speaking again. “Do you have family, Agent Blake?”

[Notes: (1) But he knows what Kane would say: _When the president asks you to serve…_ (2) Recommending him for a promotion after they attacked each other like they did during the investigation? This has to be some kind of revenge, as though Bellamy is the one who brought hell down on the House of Jaha. But he’s paranoid.]

Bellamy doesn’t understand; she has to know this already. Every detail of his life is written down in his thin file somewhere. He looks to Kane again, who raises an eyebrow pointedly. “A younger sister,” Bellamy tells the president. “She’s sixteen.”

“Would you die for her?” Griffin asks.

“Yes,” he says without thinking.

“Would you die for my daughter?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He doesn’t actually know how true that is. It’s the first rule of the Secret Service: _they come first._ It’s drilled into them. He says, as an afterthought, “But I would try not to.”

A dent appears between Griffin’s eyebrows. Has he surprised her? Is that possible? “Is that so?” she says monotonously.

“I can’t protect her if I’m dead, ma’am.”

She fixes him with her critical eyes, appraising him. Her stare is legendary, infamously intuitive. He does not know what she sees in him. “Kane,” she says.

Kane steps forward immediately, a born soldier. “Madam President.”

Bellamy’s heard the rumors about them; the whispers that they’re too close, that their relationship is something more than old knight and weary queen. He doesn’t know what to believe.

Abby Griffin is still studying Bellamy when she says, “Rush the paperwork.”

 

 

“She’s a handful,” warns his predecessor. Anya is as tough as nails and looks it, with her very high cheekbones and dangerous eyes. Bellamy respects her. “She’s charming and she’s clever and she knows it.” Anya leans back, angles her beer to her mouth, a corner of which has turned up suddenly. “That girl wants out.”

“Am I going to have trouble?” Bellamy asks

Anya shakes her head. “You don’t know the half of it,” she snorts and Bellamy is _so_ excited for this [3].

He knows nothing about the girl herself, and he expects the worst. She represents everything he has grown up hating, has every hallmark of wealth and privilege, of private school and haughty beauty. He wonders, then, why he went into this field [4].

[Notes: (3) Note sarcasm. (4) He supposes he might as well make a living out of protecting people since he’s been doing it for most of his life.]

But when he first meets Clarke Griffin, she shatters his expectations. She is not wearing crystals in her hair or pearls at her wrists or a stitch of cashmere. She is not prim or proper or bratty or petty. Like her mother, she remains to him a distant, surreal figure splattered across papers and screens from a distance. He mostly remembers her in black, face hidden behind pale hands at the many funerals she’s had to attend. The first real glimpse he has of her is of her sitting backwards on the couch, legs in the air, a pad of paper held a foot from her face.

“Hey,” she says as he closes the door behind him. “I’m about to meet Jasper for ice cream if you want to come.”

“Who’s Jasper?”

She blinks up at him in surprise, takes in his steel spine and simple suit and slicked-back hair. “You’re not Rae.”

“No,” he says dryly. “I’m your new detail.”

She sits up abruptly and tucks her legs under her, cheeks flushed. “Blake, right?” she asks, and he nods. She smoothes down her flyaway hair, already looking more formal. “What’s your first name?”

“Agent.”

She looks at him curiously then, and he realizes that she has her mother’s eyes, never mind the color. They’re the kind of eyes that shrink you, that make you feel as though you’re standing naked in a crowded room. She hums. “Come on,” she says, climbing to her feet. “You can protect me all the way to the kitchens, Agent Blake.”

He learns two things about her that day: one, she has managed to befriend the most annoying member of the culinary staff, and two, she likes strawberry ice cream. That’s enough to dislike her in Bellamy’s book.

 

 

“So, the president’s daughter, huh?” Octavia sticks her feet into Bellamy’s lap, ignoring his grumbling. He doesn’t push her away. It’s been roughly thirty hours since he’s last seen her and he’ll take all the contact she’s willing to give him.

“Yeah,” Bellamy says. “She’s…annoying.”

“I like her,” his traitorous sister remarks. “She’s really pretty, too.”

“She’s annoying,” he repeats darkly. He’d found her startlingly self-righteous when he overheard her discussing her mother’s politics in hushed tones. He also found himself agreeing with her, but that’s beside the point.

Octavia nudges him with her foot, smiling at him around her spoon. “You think everyone’s annoying,” she says. “Except me.”

He feels an unexpected pang; this promotion was supposed to be a good thing, meaning a slightly bigger paycheck and maybe an upgraded apartment. But his schedule is now more ridiculous than before, which means Octavia’s on her own for sometimes a couple of days at a time. He’s taken to stockpiling frozen dinners and casseroles in the fridge and buying all her favorite channels so she won’t be bored [5].

[Notes: (5) “I’m not a _dog_ , Bell,” she’d protested loudly.]

He doesn’t want to miss more of his little sister’s life. She won’t be little for very much longer.

“I don’t even like you,” he quips. When he reaches for the ice cream tub she kicks him in the ribs, but she’s laughing, so the pain’s worth it.

 

 

Nobody would have guessed it, but the most annoying thing about the president’s daughter is that she likes to draw.

It’s normally artsy nature stuff, like super detailed butterflies in pastel [6] and landscapes in watercolor and sketches of architecture in graphite. She gets complimented on it all the time and even sells a couple of them to foreign nationals looking to butter up her mother. But she will not stop drawing Bellamy.

The first time she did it, it was a caricature of him with a ballooned head and a scowl, block letters saying _My first name is Agent_ [7] in a speech bubble hovering over his head. She thought it was hilarious—so did Miller—but Bellamy pointedly threw it out and said, glowering, “Adorable, your highness.”

“You’re such a downer, Agent,” said Clarke dismissively. She’d already begun working on another one, this time of a smiling Miller with stars around his head. “When I rise to the throne I’m going to make it illegal for anyone to trash my art.”

“Looks like I’d better get a move on,” Bellamy had said dryly. It’d been tinged with minor acidity, but Clarke had only laughed.

After that it becomes a regular thing. During international conferences and dinners she’ll slip him a half-sheet of paper and he’ll get another cartoon of him in various embarrassing positions. When she catches his eye again, she’s holding back laughter. She’s always sneaky about it, too; they’ll be in a meeting and he’ll catch her eyeing him in between halfhearted nods and _mm-hms_. He can never stop her. She hides pencils _everywhere_ —in her tiny purses, her pockets, behind her ears—just so she can piss him off by doodling him on the corners of newspapers and napkins.

Once she falls asleep on Air Force One with a stack of Post-Its in her hand and he catches sight of another one of him—this time detailed and sketchy, like she’d actually put time and effort into it. She snorts herself awake and catches him looking, turns as red as the dress she’s wearing. “I was going to give you a Squidward nose,” she says, probably to save face.

“My beauty can’t be ruined by a Squidward nose,” he replies, and there is something oddly endearing in watching her shove it into her beaded purse with lowered eyes. Rarely is she ever embarrassed.

On Octavia’s birthday [8] Clarke presents him with a watercolor portrait of O, surrounded by butterflies, signature and everything. He looks at her suspiciously, and she just smiles sweetly. “Tell her I said happy birthday,” she says.

[Notes: (6) Octavia literally will not shut up about the one he came home with; it’s still tacked onto her wall and her little friends keep coming over to coo over it. (7) He will never, ever live this down. (8) He has no idea how she knows the date, let alone O’s name or what she looks like. Bellamy suspects she’s been snooping into his file again.]

“I _love_ her,” Octavia says gleefully, smoothing it out on the kitchen table. Bellamy doesn’t. He grumbles it, but he lets O stick the new onto the fridge. Everyone says Clarke Griffin has a way of worming into people’s hearts, and even if looking at that painting exacerbates that warmth in his chest, Bellamy is determined to remain more resistant than his pushover little sister and best friend.

 

 

The third time Bellamy catches Clarke trying to sneak out of a back door, he wants to strangle her.

“It’s just dinner with friends, Bellamy,” says the girl with a scowl [9].

“No, it’s not,” he snaps. He’s got a hand wrapped around her elbow and a foot in the doorway, blocking it. “It’s an operation that needs at least three days of prep and two other agents. It’s a kidnapping waiting to happen. It’s your _life_ , get that, princess?”

She rips her arm out of his grip. “I just want to _breathe,_ ” she hisses at him, and there’s that fire in her eyes that he’s seen in her mother at cabinet meetings and international summits. “I just want to take a goddamn breath without being _watched._ Get that, Agent?” She turns on her heel and marches off with her stiff shoulders and high chin, and from across the room Miller raises his eyebrows, having heard it all through the comm in his ear [10].

Bellamy finds her in the bathroom alone, facing the window with her arms crossed and her eyes wet. Seeing her cry is startling. He’s seen her grief-stricken in grainy photographs, tight-mouthed at public events, distressed after arguments with her mother, but… He’s never seen it in real life. Somehow he’d thought that this girl—this same  girl who butts heads with prime ministers over policy and with royal children over football and wins every time—would never shed a tear [11].

[Notes: (9) Ever since she’d snooped into his file and found out his first name she hadn’t stopped using it to irk him. (10) He hopes this’ll be one of those times when Miller doesn’t ask him any questions. (11) In this aspect and this aspect alone, she reminds him oddly of Octavia.]

He feels an inexplicable tug at the sight of her. “Are you okay, Miss Griffin?” he says gruffly.

“I’m fine,” she tells him, but does so without turning around.

He holds out a paper towel, and she takes it grudgingly. “Thank you, Agent Blake,” she mutters quietly, and that’s how they know they’re even. 

 _That girl wants out,_ Anya had said, without malice or irritation or even amusement. It’s only now that Bellamy is realizing the depth of that truth. She doesn’t just want to get out, she wants to be _normal_. Normal girls don’t have an entourage of black suits following their every move or motorcades to every event or newspapers detailing their every expression and text message. Normal girls don’t handle three charities at once and take classes on how to survive kidnappings.

For the first time, he pities her.

 

 

An average day in the White House goes something like this: assuming he’s been home that night, he gets in at around six thirty in the morning and goes through security [12]. He checks in with all the other agents on Clarke’s detail, flirts with a maid or two, then looks over her itinerary for the day. Then he waits. He waits because, as he learned very early on, Clarke Griffin does not get up until eight in the morning. Not seven fifty-nine. Not even seven fifty-nine and thirty seconds. Eight in the morning. It’s bolded and underlined on her schedule for a reason.

When the clock hits eight a.m., the grumbles of the White House princess can be heard throughout the presidential suite (President Griffin will have been up by four thirty if she hasn’t pulled an all-nighter), and by eight-oh-five a.m., Bellamy will have to head into her bedroom, grab one of the pale skinny ankles sticking out of her bed, and literally drag her out. She scowls at him, a mess of tawny hair and bleary eyes, but she finally gets up. She is not able to form sentences until someone puts coffee in her hands [13].

By eight forty-five, she looks like the presentable girl typically spotted throughout the White House in jeans and a pretty blouse. She makes Bellamy and Miller sit down with her while she eats and do the _New York Times_ crossword, which they always get wrong.

“The thing about the _New York Times_ ,” Clarke will say, irritably and invariably, “is that they rarely put in the correct number of boxes for these words.” She’ll be penning in the word _octopus_ for what is supposed to be _Augustus_ (or something like that) but neither agent will correct her.

Then follows the rest of her day: meet and greet with children in the Roosevelt Room at ten, lunch with the chairperson of one of her many charities at eleven thirty, calculus homework at one, a well-timed run-in with the president’s personal aid Raven in the kitchens at two fifteen, meeting with the press secretary at two thirty, paper on the fall of the Roman empire from three to five, then a painfully silent dinner with her mother at five-thirty.

He hadn’t realized that _strained relationship_ meant _broken relationship_ when it came to President Griffin and her daughter. He doesn’t remember the details of Jake Griffin’s downfall [14]. He just remembers the main points: insider trading, an inquisition of an investigation, would-be imprisonment if death hadn’t gotten in the way.

[Notes: (12) It’s a painstaking but necessary process, or so his training tells him. (13) She takes it with so much sugar it’s not even coffee anymore. “I’m a child at heart,” she declares. (14) He was overseas when the scandal hit its peak. He was more concerned with staying alive.]

It takes about two minutes standing outside that dining room listening to nothing but the clanking of forks for him to realize that she blames her mother.

He glances at the other agents in the hall. The rules come back to him: _you are deaf, blind, and mute. You are a statue._ But it suddenly seems very hard to follow those rules when he catches the hardness of Clarke’s eyes, the stiffness of her posture when her mother touches her.

He wonders when, exactly, he began to care so much.

 

 

He’s good at his job— _damn good,_ Kane had said once [15]. He can count exits at a glance and fell someone without drawing his weapon. He can spot a gun in a crowd and take bullets for someone else. He knows every bullet point and footnote in the stacks of protocol books gathering dust in the office like gravestones. He’s pretty sure that somewhere in them is _don’t fall in love with the president’s daughter._

But it’s too little, too late for that, he thinks helplessly. Falling for Clarke was like falling asleep; one moment he wasn’t, and then he _was_ , beyond hope, beyond help. Going to work feels less like a chore and more like a privilege. He lends her his jackets and holds her purse and glues to her side. He watches her try to fill the role that has been set out for her, watches her fall short. He watches her give and give and give, and his heart _squeezes_.

She’s too good for him, too good for anyone. She’s too good to be hastily dabbing concealer at the dark circles under her eyes before public appearances and smiling falsely beside her mother. She’s too good to be isolated in her presidential suite, resigned to befriending employees [16].

[Notes: (15) Yes, this was said grudgingly and through a clenched jaw. It makes the list of Top Twenty Moments of His Life. (16) “Princess in a tower,” she remarks with a laugh, but Bellamy doesn’t find it funny.]

She’s too good to be alone on the anniversary of her best friend’s death, eyes wet, hugging herself because she has no one to comfort her but Bellamy, who can do nothing but look on sympathetically.

“Everyone keeps dying,” she tells him, and he wishes he could hold her. She turns and fixes him with that paralyzing blue stare of hers. “But not you, okay?” There is something in her face, her petal-pink nose and half-open mouth. He can’t speak. He is falling apart at the seams. He is giving in. “Not you,” she says again.

“Not without your say-so, princess,” he says, and then clamps his mouth shut as she laughs so he won’t blurt out the steady stream of _I love yous_ running through his head.

 

 

They’ve got thirty minutes to go before they’re back at the White House, and Clarke has fallen asleep on Bellamy’s shoulder in the motorcade.

She snores. It’s damaging that he knows that now, how she sounds when she sleeps. He should know it already—he’s seen her knock out half a thousand times in armchairs and on benches and once even standing up—but it’s different when her cheek is pressed to his shoulder, her hair brushing his jaw.

It’s unfair. It’s unfair and really shitty and a little fucked up, because she’s eighteen and vibrant while he’s twenty-three and tired and sometimes—just sometimes—he wonders if it would’ve been better if that slug they pulled out of him overseas had struck him just a few more inches to the left [17].

What does he have to offer her, anyway? She’s surrounded by English royalty and French heirs named Jean-Paul. He’s a college dropout with an honorable discharge and a measly paycheck, a broom closet of an apartment and a teenage ward, and sometimes in the middle of the night he forgets that he’s not still fighting somebody else’s war.

He’s not good for someone like her, no matter how good she might be for him. But there’s still a part of him—indestructible and eternal—that hopes. He keeps thinking he should say something, get that weight off his chest [18]. Every time he catches a moment alone with her, when there’s a moment of comfortable silence or a smile on her face, he thinks, _I should_. But that would do more harm than good, and he couldn’t bear that.

[Notes: (17) _Lucky_ , they’d called him. It’d felt like it for about six months. (18) She is infinitely surprising him; who’s to say she won’t in this?]

“Technically you _could_ survive off of urine, but I’m not drinking your piss unless I’m two minutes from death,” says Clarke to Jasper and Raven on the phone.

 _I love you,_ he thinks helplessly.

 

 

“Are you seriously playing Angry Birds right now?”

Clarke leans over to peer into his lap, her blonde hair tickling his nose. She smells like her favorite perfume and expensive shampoo and his heart kicks into a gallop. He stops breathing, leans away from her subtly.

“Don’t judge me,” he mutters. He’s the only agent seated. On the stage to their right President Griffin is silhouetted in front of a podium, her voice booming throughout the ballroom. “This is, like, the third time we’ve heard this speech.”

Clarke straightens up, as if remembering that they’re being watched. She looks purposefully the prim and proper daughter in her demure pale dress and low heels, an archetype she’s been bullied into by her mother’s publicity team. It doesn’t suit her.

“Jackson writes a great speech,” Clarke says, and Bellamy rolls his eyes pointedly where only she can see. She puts a hand on his knee abruptly, and he flinches at the jolt that goes through his veins. “Let’s get some air,” she whispers, and she’s up and moving before he can stop her [18].

He has no choice but to follow.

Nobody tries to stop them as they slip out the doors. The other agents either like or fear Clarke too much to get in her way, and so they don’t even glance over. They do catch some curious looks, though. Bellamy’s already seeing the article that will give the president’s publicity team more reason to hate him: _Not Even Griffin’s Daughter Wants to Hear Her Talk—(Clarke Griffin flees the president’s address)_. He’s about to say so; he’s about to tell her she only gets three minutes, that she can’t be out of a cameraman’s lens for too long, but the words die in his throat.

Clarke doesn’t seem to be thinking about any of that; she’s filling her lungs with the cool air gratefully, looking blissful and lovely in the fading light, and Bellamy suddenly doesn’t have the heart to deprive her of a moment’s peace.

“I can’t wait to disappear,” she sighs. He’s not sure he’s supposed to be hearing her. But then she looks sidelong at him with that glitter in her eyes and his heart _lurches_ —almost bursts out of his chest.

“What do you mean?” he asks hoarsely. She turns away, breaks eye contact and his trance.

“I can’t wait to get away,” Clarke amends. She is leaning town to pull off her shoes, teetering on one foot. Bellamy is automatically extending his arm to steady her before he realizes it [19]. “To go to college,” she continues, “to—” She stops.

“Be free,” he says knowingly.

She flashes one of her special smiles, a brief and precious quirk of her lips. “Yeah,” she agrees.

But of course, he thinks, she will never be free the way she wants to be. She’ll always be Abby Griffin’s daughter, always be a point of interest, always be a featurette in a tabloid or a byline in the paper. He realizes suddenly that she is haunted, too.

She is standing in the wet grass, feet bare, her shoes dangling from her hand, when she turns toward him with a sudden frown. “You’ll come with, right?”

Bellamy blinks. “What?”

“With me. To college,” Clarke says. “I mean—I want to go north.” Her eyebrows push together delicately. “I know Octavia’s here, so you might…”

“I’ll go,” Bellamy says, and has to bite down on the end of that sentence so it won’t taint whatever peace he has with her [20]. “O wants to go to NYU, so maybe…”  
Clarke beams, turns away again with her golden hair swinging and fingers just barely touching the silken tips of leaves and blossoms. She is the picture of the beautiful princess. He recognizes this as one of those rare moments when they are truly alone, when no one is listening or watching, when the world seems to slow down and hold its breath, and he knows he might not get another chance to say it.

And then it passes.

“Maybe we’ll live happily ever after,” she laughs, and it’s times like this, times where she breaks out her soft smile and her _we_ ’s that give him hope. Despite himself his heart thuds out an uneven, broken beat.

It’s such a loaded word that he fears it. _Maybe_ he’ll follow her for the next ten years. _Maybe_ he’ll love her for the ten after that. _Maybe_ he’ll go out of this world protecting her. He doesn’t care, he realizes with alarming certainty. She’s become a new anchor of the turning world, alongside his sister.

“We should go back in,” he makes himself say, because he’s supposed to be responsible even if it kills him.

Clarke sighs. “Yeah,” she says. Her stocking-covered feet are grass-stained when she steps back onto the concrete, and her bare skin is covered in goosebumps. “The History channel’s doing a special on Caesar tonight. Wanna watch it?” [21]

[Notes: (19) He’s started to think in terms of her; she has only to frown and he’ll be rushing to get what she needs. He’s a full-time butler and he doesn’t even care. (20) _I’ll go anywhere you go_. (21) She is the only other person he’s met that loves documentaries as much as he does.]

He is so gone for this girl. He just nods mutely, watches her traipse past him barefoot before pausing with her hand on the door’s handle and looking back curiously at what must be a dumbstruck look on his face.

“I’m right behind you,” he tells her.

**Author's Note:**

> Also: I listened to "Flawless" by The Neighborhood like a thousand times while I wrote this. And the footnotes thing is new to me but I figured I'd use it since like, all that info was parenthetical and sloppy before.


End file.
